It’s a simple exchange, and in someone else’s play it might slip by unnoticed. But in David Auburn’s “The Columnist,” this moment between two characters from relatively recent history — Stewart Alsop, of The Saturday Evening Post, and the young David Halberstam, of The New York Times — is overlaid with poignancy. Halberstam was a mere 30 years old when, in 1964, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War reporting. Auburn was just 31 when, in 2001, he won a Pulitzer for his hit Broadway play, “Proof,” about a mathematical genius who fears she has inherited her father’s mental illness along with his brilliance.

Get The Weekender in your inbox:

The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond.

The prolific Halberstam didn’t disappear from view after his Pulitzer, but Auburn largely receded for years from the playwriting scene. Now, returning to Broadway for the first time since “Proof” closed in 2003, he is a more mature dramatist, a smoother craftsman, a more evenhandedly empathetic observer of human behavior. “The Columnist,” a torn-from-the-obits tale of journalism, politics, and personal compromise in mid-20th-century America, is a quieter work than “Proof,” and less intellectually glittering, but it is also more solidly made, and often witheringly funny.

THE COLUMNIST

Author:

David Auburn

Publisher:

Faber and Faber

Number of pages:

99 pp., paperback

Book price:

$14

Its title character is Stewart Alsop’s older brother and sometime collaborator, the widely syndicated newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop. Harvard-educated, related to the Roosevelts on Eleanor’s side, he uses his power-player status in the nation’s capital as both weapon and bauble. When “The Columnist” opens on a postcoital tableau, the vehement anti-communist is in a Moscow hotel room in 1954 with a Russian named Andrei, who’d like someday to visit Washington.

From that first scene, which ends with a knock on the door from the KGB, there is plenty of cruelty, betrayal, and maddening behavior in “The Columnist.” Much of it emanates from Joe, a man who routinely torments his brother; uses emotional sadism as a bludgeon against his intelligent, socially invaluable wife, Susan; and thinks nothing of phoning Halberstam’s editor to try to get the reporter pulled off the Vietnam War beat. But Auburn never offers us the easy out of a villain to root against, the way he did with the coldly brisk older sister, Claire, in “Proof.” Rather, he makes us feel Joe’s loneliness, credit his kindnesses, and warm to his convivial magnetism — the quality that draws a reveling President Kennedy to his home in the wee hours of inauguration night, after the balls are through.

Auburn has changed some details of the Alsops’ lives, and rejiggered the chronology somewhat in constructing his airtight plot, but the part about inauguration night? True.

Last year, Auburn had a play off-Broadway: his adaptation of Langdon Mitchell’s little-known 1906 farce, “The New York Idea.” Set at the turn of the 20th century, it’s a breezy trifle about divorce, remarriage, and the importance of feeling what the play calls a “whim” for someone before signing on for life with him. Joe, however, is a denizen of a world in which it would take extreme bravery for a gay man to act publicly on such a feeling. When, in 1967, someone tells him that his sexual orientation is “really not that big a thing,” it rings horribly false.

But for the most part, “The Columnist” retains its time-capsule feel. Working within the restrictions of what once was conventional thought, it shows us what mainstream America used to be afraid of — gay rights, women’s rights, creeping communism — frequently to disastrous effect.

And, of course, it shows us what we didn’t even know to worry about. “How many newspapers do you have in America?” Andrei, the young Muscovite, asks Joe in that first scene. “Every major city has five or six,” Joe tells him. “It’s one of our great strengths.”

BostonGlobe.com complimentary digital access has been provided to you, without a subscription, for free starting today and ending in 14 days. After the free trial period, your free BostonGlobe.com digital access will stop immediately unless you sign up for BostonGlobe.com digital subscription. Current print and digital subscribers are not eligible for the free trial.

Thanks & Welcome to Globe.com

You now have unlimited access for the next two weeks.

BostonGlobe.com complimentary digital access has been provided to you, without a subscription, for free starting today and ending in 14 days. After the free trial period, your free BostonGlobe.com digital access will stop immediately unless you sign up for BostonGlobe.com digital subscription. Current print and digital subscribers are not eligible for the free trial.